Modernism

9 Key excerpts on "Modernism"

• 

  eBook - ePub

  A History of Modernist Literature

  • Andrzej Gasiorek(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  Should Modernism, in other words, be conceived as an experimental movement that challenged literary conventions or should it be seen more broadly as a set of discursive practices that engaged with modernity in a variety of ways, some of which were not formally venturesome? This question admits of no easy answer, and it has been the subject of intense critical debate. The view I take throughout this book is that Modernism does denote a commitment to literary experimentation and that it makes little sense to use the term as a catch-all for writing that deals with socially pressing issues but that does so in entirely familiar ways. When Modernism is used as a descriptor of the whole literary culture of the period, it loses specificity and meaning, for it was not only understood by its proponents as a radical overhaul of established literary forms but also was discussed in these terms by the critics who first codified it. To lose sight of these respective histories of creative work and critical interpretation is to turn the movement we are assessing into something else altogether, even if we recognise (as we must) that no definition of Modernism will be adequate to its overdetermined complexity and its internally fissured nature. 5 As Michael Levenson observes: ‘Vague terms still signify. Such is the case with “Modernism”: it is at once vague and unavoidable’. 6 The view I take in this book is that Modernism’s boundaries are permeable and that it is not the job of the critic to police them. If it is unhelpful to consider all twentieth-century writing as ‘modernist’, then it is not useful to define the term narrowly and then exclude all writing that does not quite conform to a restrictive definition, which in any case is bound to be contested. In the broadest sense, then, Modernism should be taken to refer to writing that expresses a degree of dissatisfaction with prevalent inherited literary conventions and attempts to extend, challenge, or destroy them

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  Encyclopedia of Literature and Criticism

  • Martin Coyle, Peter Garside, Malcolm Kelsall, John Peck(Authors)
  • 2002(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  7 Modernism David Brooks DOI: 10.4324/9780203403624-9

  Literary criticism is not an exact science. Attempts at precise definition often say as much about the time in which they are made as they do about the thing defined. A significant difficulty in the definition of Modernism is that there are, in effect, two principal schools of thought concerning the term. Modernism can be seen on the one hand as applying to a particular group of writers and artists in a particular period, and on the other as describing a certain artistic posture, an attitude toward the Modern, as viable today as it was seventy years ago, and just as possible long before that.

  The first of these schools, moreover, is itself subdivided, some suggesting that Modernism functions as a grab-bag into which a number of other and perhaps lesser developments (realism, naturalism, symbolism, impressionism, expressionism, imagism, vorticism, futurism, dadaism, surrealism, etc.) might be stuffed, and others that it is in fact a school among such schools, or that there is a High Modernism quite strictly limited to certain figures significant or emerging in the period immediately surrounding the First World War and so, as a literary phenomenon, to a small group (Ezra Pound, T.S.Eliot, Wyndham Lewis, James Joyce principal amongst them) who share some particular formal and conceptual characteristics. The situation is further complicated by two other major factors: that Modernism was pantechnical— as much a phenomenon of music, painting, sculpture and their influence as it was of literature—and emphatically international, an upheaval not just in English, but in Western art generally.

  Even this early, however, one must take care not to distort the discussion. While one of the principal ways in which modernist writers achieved their desired severance from the immediate and largely domestic tradition was through the use of exotic models, and one undeniable origin of English Modernism might thus be located in the first concerted attempts to imitate forms and styles recently developed in France and elsewhere, an over-emphasis upon exotic injection should not be seen to suggest that there were no coeval attempts at severance or development within more exclusively English parameters, although in some ways these—the muted Modernisms of Thomas Hardy, Edward Thomas or D.H.Lawrence, for example—found their task harder and their profile less dramatic.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  Modernism

  • Anna Anselmo(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • EDUCatt Università Cattolica

    (Publisher)

  All in all, modernist writing is rich in irreverence and known for “its experimentation, its complexity, its formalism, and for its attempt to create ‘a tradition of the new’. Its historical and social background includes the emergence of the New Woman, the peak and downturn of the British Empire, unprecedented technological change, the rise of the new Labour Party, the appearance of factory-line mass production, war in Africa, Europe, and elsewhere. Modernism has therefore almost universally been considered a literature of not just change but crisis”

  [49] .

  4. The Modernist Novel

  “Modernist writing,” Peter Childs writes, “arises at a certain time in history and at a particular point in literary history”. In terms of the novel, it is seen as a reaction to the hegemony of realism. Modernists did not criticize realism in aesthetic representation or the possibility of art as mimesis, but the realist fiction which, during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, went under the name of realism. Classic realism flowered in the nineteenth century and can be identified as possessing certain characterizing features: reliable narrators and representative characters immersed in recognizable settings and in a recognizable social system.

  “Classic realism,” Catherine Belsey writes, “presents individuals whose traits of character, understood as essential and predominantly given, constrain the choices they make, and whose potential for development depends on what is given. Human nature is thus seen as a system of character-differences existing in the world, but one which nonetheless permits the reader to share the hopes and fears of a wide range of kinds of characters. This contradiction – that readers, like the central figures of fiction, are unique, and that so many readers can identify with so many protagonists – is accommodated in ideology as a paradox”

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  Analyzing Literature-to-Film Adaptations

  A Novelist's Exploration and Guide

  • Mary H. Snyder(Author)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • Continuum

    (Publisher)

  Although postModernism isn’t actually a type of literary analysis, it is important to understand how it fits into the way we look at literature today, as well as at other texts, including of course film. Distinguishing postModernism from Modernism, as well as poststructuralism, helps to understand a bit about not only the history of literature, but the history of literary theory and criticism. Michael Payne says in his essay “The Survival of Truth after Derrida” that deconstruction and poststructuralism are often mistakenly associated with postModernism. He states, though, that postModernism “is a cultural style, like classicism and romanticism; and like those styles, it can never be securely defined, though it can be described” (2000, 128).

  It’s best to begin by describing Modernism, which was the name given to the movement in the arts and culture of the first half of the twentieth century. It was a movement that reevaluated and reconceived the way art and culture were practiced, so that all the previous elements were challenged and rejected. In literature, this meant “a rejection of traditional realism (chronological plots, continuous narratives relayed by omniscient narrators, ‘closed endings’, etc.) in favour of experimental forms of various kinds” (Barry 2009, 78–9). High Modernism constituted the time from 1910 to 1930 and among the big names were T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, Franz Kafka, and Rainer Maria Rilke. Literary Modernism placed emphasis on impressionism and subjectivity — on how we see not what we see; a movement away from objectivity; a blurring of genre styles, a new appreciation of fragmentation, discontinuous narrative, and collage-style writing; and a reflexive quality in the writing itself about just that, writing. This pushed literature into more experimental styles and innovation. It retreated after the 1930s only to resurge in the 1960s, but not with the fervor it had in its earlier run (79).

  PostModernism is seen as oppositional to Modernism rather than sequential. It didn’t simply pick up where Modernism left off; it was a reaction to Modernism in a sense, retaining some of the elemental aspects of Modernism while rejecting others. The distinctions begin with the postmodernist view of fragmentation as opposed to the view taken by modernists. Barry states that postModernism views fragmentation as “an exhilarating, liberating phenomenon, symptomatic of our escape from the claustrophobic embrace of fixed systems of belief . . . the modernist laments fragmentation while the postmodernist celebrates it” (81). Second, while Modernism eschewed the ornate and elaborate art forms of the nineteenth century, “postModernism rejects the distinction between ‘high’ and ‘popular’ art which was important in Modernism, and believes in excess, in gaudiness, and in ‘bad taste’ mixtures of qualities” (81).

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  Modernist Fiction

  An Introduction

  • R.W. Stevenson(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Lawrence himself warned that novelists’ comments on their work are never entirely to be trusted, and it is possible that the modernists may sometimes have borrowed more from each other than they were prepared to admit. Nevertheless, the statements quoted above do help to indicate that – unlike other contemporary movements such as Imagism, Futurism or Vorticism – Modernism involved little direct association between the writers involved. It was never a movement fostered through personal contacts or collective agreement about aims, goals, ideas or styles. Modernism is a critical construct – a recognition, some years after writers completed the work involved, of substantial similarity or even a collective identity in the initiatives they took and the styles and concerns they made a priority. This, however, does not make less viable the idea of Modernism or of its coherence as a movement. As the present study will show, developments individual authors made independently from each other are nevertheless clearly comparable, and often related to one another more or less logically and progressively, one change of style following incrementally from another throughout the early decades of the century. Yet modernist authors’ relative independence from each other does raise one obvious question about their work. If mutual association or influence cannot much account for manifold similarities throughout this phase of contemporary writing, what can?

  One answer, really as obvious as the question, has already been offered by Alan Friedman’s remarks, quoted in the Preface. The originality of modernist fiction, for Friedman, is owed to the originality of ‘the modern experience’ itself, to ‘causes’ in its philosophy, psychology, science, society, economics and politics. Along with so much contemporary art, modernist fiction changed radically in structure and style because the world it envisaged changed radically at the time, as indeed did means of envisaging it. Analogous innovations in so many contemporary art forms may have arisen not from mutual influence – Joyce did not restructure his work only because contemporary painters had done so, nor vice versa – but from common apprehension of the shifting nature of life, and of methods of perceiving it, in the early twentieth century. In other words, if contemporary novelists ‘changed everything’ in their work, as Thomas Hardy suggests, it would be reasonable to suppose that this was simply because they perceived everything around them as changed – even, in Woolf’s view, human character itself.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  Consciousness in Modernist Fiction

  A Stylistic Study

  • V. Sotirova(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  At the same time, the dismantling of the conventions of previous literary traditions on a scale that challenges the easy processing of literary texts is a factor that has prompted other critics to interpret such texts as elitist and ahistorical. The difficulty in reading Modernist texts, which can be explained with a close analysis of their formal make-up, can easily be seen as the result of a deliberate attempt to obfuscate reality and in this way renounce responsibility for any social engagement with pertinent political issues. After all, Modernist texts do not present a transparent and realistic picture of the world as it had been known in literary representation until then. Their linguistic difficulty makes it hard to comprehend any ideas that might lie behind their surface texture. The persistent resistance to straightforward representation creates comprehension difficulties that can be viewed as an expression of a historically disengaged attitude that remains aloof and that seeks the perfection of the artistic sign, but severs and denigrates its connection to the signified real.

  It is to these wider questions of the cultural and historical significance of Modernism that have dominated critical debates about Modernism, therefore, that I must now turn in order to establish a connection between style and cultural history, and thereby begin to chart the way of the stylistic cultural history which is the subject of this book.

  2 The critical commonplace of Modernism

  It has become a commonplace in literary criticism to characterise Modernism as the most revolutionary movement in the history of literature. In a classic of literary criticism, Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane describe Modernism as one of ‘those cataclysmic upheavals of culture, those fundamental convulsions of the creative human spirit that seem to topple even the most solid and substantial of our beliefs and assumptions, leave great areas of the past in ruins’ (1976: 19). Edmund Wilson, in his pioneering study of tendencies in literature during the period 1870–1930, states that the authors with whom he is concerned (which include W.B. Yeats, T.S. Eliot and James Joyce) ‘have succeeded in effecting in literature a revolution analogous to that which has taken place in science and philosophy: they have broken out of the old mechanistic routine, they have disintegrated the old materialism, and they have revealed to the imagination a new flexibility and freedom’ (1979 [1931]: 235). Harry Blamires also states in no ambiguous terms that ‘the leading modern writers Yates, Eliot, Joyce, and D.H. Lawrence, together with associated figures such as Ford, Pound, and Wyndham Lewis’ through their artistic achievements ‘effected a literary revolution’ (1982: 89). Ástráður Eysteinsson speaks of Modernism in similar terms as a concept ‘signifying a paradigmatic shift, a major revolt, beginning in the mid- and late nineteenth century against the prevalent literary and aesthetic traditions of the Western world’ (1990: 2).

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  Modernism (Routledge Revivals)

  • Peter Faulkner(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  2

  The era of Modernism: 1910–1930

  Socially the period was one of widespread turmoil and suffering, including the 1914–18 war and the beginning of the economic depression. Yet culturally it was a great creative period, which produced such works as Eliot’s The Waste Land, Pound’s Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, Joyce’s Ulysses, Lawrence’s Women in Love, Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, and Yeats’ The Tower, to say nothing of the contemporary work of Rilke, Blok, Mayakovsky, Pasternak, Machado, Apollinaire, Ungaretti, Alberti, Mann, Proust, Kafka, and Svevo. And this is in literature alone. The challenge to the artist is always to combine openness to experience with formal control, and the art of this troubled period often thrived on the challenge. The discussion in this section is at first general and then specific, focusing in the later parts on the critical ideas of two leading modernists, Eliot and Virginia Woolf, and ending with two major modernist works, Pound’s Mauberley and Joyce’s Ulysses, and with a general account of D. H. Lawrence.

  General considerations

  Any ascription of dates to cultural movements is bound to be arbitrary, but there can be little doubt that the two decades 1910–30 constitute an intelligible unity from the point of view of the present discussion. (Obviously historians of politics, war or economics will see the century in a different shape – but that kind of plural vision is one of the central recognitions of Modernism itself.) There can be valid disagreement about the extent of the interaction between culture and society, but it is evident that modernist art is very much aware of the state of the world around it. Thus many kinds of facts about the early twentieth century are relevant. In general what was happening can be seen as a breaking-up (more or less violent in different countries and areas of activity) of the nineteenth-century consensus. Some aspects of this have already been seen in relation to Henry James and Yeats, but it can be illustrated from almost every sphere of life. Politically there is the increasing challenge to Capital by Labour, no longer prepared to accept a completely subordinate role as the economic benefits of industrialism became more obvious. Socially this was paralleled in the efforts of other dominated groups to improve their status: the feminists are a striking example. The weakening of the idea of subordination in the more open, flexible and competitive situation of increased social mobility meant that the old simple verities no longer seemed true. Accepting one’s place, loyalty to authority, unquestioning obedience, began to break down; patriotism, doing one’s duty, even Christianity, seemed questionable ideals. Man’s understanding of himself was changing. Anthropology was probing the primitive roots of religion: James Frazer’s The Golden Bough

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  The History of British Women's Writing, 1920-1945

  Volume Eight

  • M. Joannou(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  Introduction: Modernism, Modernity, and the Middlebrow in Context

  Maroula Joannou

  Literary Modernism and women’s writing, 1920–1945

  This book discusses a broad spectrum of writing by women much of which is not widely-known, including forgotten drama, narratives of empire, opinion-shaping journalism, poetry originally published in small magazines, feminine middlebrow fiction, historical novels, and popular crime fiction. The women writers in this book are important to our understanding of which aspects of modernity we privilege in constructing narratives to account for the literary production of the early and middle years of the twentieth century. The majority of women whose work is discussed in volume eight of Palgrave’s History of British Women’s Writing do not fit into a recognized version of the modernist canon. Their complex and often troubled relationship to modernity – as readers, consumers, and travellers at home and abroad – requires new critical frameworks in which to discuss their writing as well as a revision of the territory that has been staked out as the preserve of Modernism by critical theory and practice.

  The historical period from 1920 to 1945 is coterminous with the great achievements of literary Modernism dating approximately from the annus mirabilis of 1922, which saw T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and James Joyce’s Ulysses , to the publication of Joyce’s Finnegans Wake at the apex of ‘high Modernism’ in 1939. The canonical literary history of Britain in these years has been dominated by the towering figures of James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and Virginia Woolf who, in the spirit of Pound’s celebrated injunction to ‘Make it New’,1

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  Culture and Politics

  Class, Writing, Socialism

  • Raymond Williams(Author)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • Verso

    (Publisher)

  As we shall see, the people who were making innovations in these different arts were very conscious that they were making something new, and they might occasionally use the word modern in relation to their work, but they did not see themselves as modernists or part of Modernism. The sense that has been given is largely retrospective and this has importance because in that retrospective generalization ideological points have been made but made surreptitiously, not declared as values and arguments but offered as a kind of history which carries certain inevitable conclusions. To those people above all one must address the question: ‘When Was Modernism?’ Is it for example in the novel, those radical innovations which one can identify with the names of Nikolai Gogol or Gustave Flaubert or Charles Dickens, which would have us around the middle of the nineteenth century? Or is it those innovations which one associates with the names of say Marcel Proust, James Joyce, and Franz Kafka? I know what the New York generalization of the 1950s tells us – Proust, Joyce, Kafka – but that is the sort of unresolved point which we will be exploring. In painting, is the new, radical break the impressionists for example? Which would take us back in certain ways to John Constable, who was seen in the 1830s as painting in certain radical new ways which offended contemporary sensibility. Or is it to be dated precisely at post-impressionism, the move away from representation, cubism, and so on? In verse, is it to be dated to the symbolists of the 1870s or 1880s? Or is it to be dated to those many schools of poets, futurists, constructivists, and imagists who precisely rejected symbolism as an outdated form? Symbolism itself had been seen as a radical break, remember. In drama, is it the extraordinary innovation of Henrik Ibsen, or the equally extraordinary but different innovation of August Strindberg? 1 They were seen in their time as carriers of the new

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book